Progress
by STUPID COYOTE
Summary: "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that, is simply progress."-Jacob    It hasn't ended yet. There were others before Flight 815, and there will most definitely be others afterwards. A man washes up on the shore.


**Episode One: Pilot**

The tide rises, and brings a man with it. He is wearing a dark pair of jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and a brown bomber jacket. His rough brown hair, now wet, hangs over his brown eyes, and he starts, coughing up water and rolling onto his side on the cold sand. The stars hung in the sky like spectators, waiting to see what he was going to do.

He stands, to survey his location. To his left, there is a dilapidated pier jutting into the water, with many of the planks missing. Before him lies an expansive jungle. He sighs, and stands, and looks up and down the coastline, eventually deciding to walk to his left. It doesn't matter what direction he walks in, especially in the dark.

He walks for ten minutes before he finds the raft. He doesn't even realize what it is until he's almost right on top of it, but the inflatable yellow is unmistakable. He brushes past, regretting that he wasn't able to take anyone else with him. The storm had materialized so quickly, and the ship was going down...there was nothing he could have done...

He has to assume that he's on an island, marooned for lack of a better word, because their ship was nowhere near any mainland. In another situation, he would havie been excited. After all, it had been their mission to locate, study, and document a very specific island in the South Pacific. Things had been going well before the storm.

He doesn't know anything about his employer, but he doesn't care about the mysterious aspect of how he was hired. He had been lured in by the promise of a voyage to a place on Earth the likes of which he had never experienced. That, and the money.

He is a very qualified biologist, a graduate from the University of Indiana, and until he had seen the ad on the internet, unemployed. He had been skeptical of the job offer at first, but as the training and orientation began, he had been surprised by how close he'd become with some of the people on the team.

He stops thinking back to them, because he's worried, sick to his stomach, and he knows that not everyone got off the ship alive. He kneels over, and throws up in the sand, close to the tide. When he looks up, he is drawn to a rock formation perched above him. It looks like a window.

As well as he can, he follows a path through the trees as it slopes up to the Window Rock. When he gets there, he is more interested in what he sees below than the rock itself. On the other side of the hill is a small peninsula jutting out into the stormy night sea, peppered here and there by small huts. He carefully steps down from the bluff upon which Window Rock is perched, and falls into the fist hut he sees. There is a cot lying there, on the floor.

He knows he should be wondering who built the huts, who lived or lives there, but he is exhausted. After seperating from his raft, he had swum at least two hundred yards to the beach. He collapses onto the cot, kicking off his sneakers and falling into a deep, deep sleep.

He awakes as the sun is streaming through the gaps in the woven walls of the hut. Sweeping though the curtain door, he is alert, because he's hearing voices. The island he's landed on, he finds, is beautiful in the light, and the sea has calmed down. But the voices...they're coming from one of the other huts. He looks around wildly, not much of a warrior, and grabs a rock as a weapon, clutching it nervously in his left hand. The voices are just as loud, oblivious to what's about to happen.

But when he sweeps aside the curtain of the hut in question, the rock slips from his hand. Two women are sitting on the cot, and turn when he walks in. One of them is wearing the same bomber jacket as he is, with long red hair. The other has a red blouse on, with a cropped, jet-black pixie haircut.

"Tyler?" The redhead exclaims, in shock.

**END**


End file.
